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THE JOY OF THE 

ATRE 




Class ?N 2 039 

Book •Sts.'L 

Copyright N° 

COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



FELLOWSHIP BOOKS 

hEte^GvfJMani Stratton 



THE JOY OF THE 
THEATRE 



COPYRIGHT 1913 

BY e. p. DUTTON & CO. 



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THE JOY OF THE 
THEATRE 

13t£ GiWert Cannon 




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DCI.A350437 



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IN writing of the theatre of our time he 
who would choose such a title might 
fairly be suspected of irony, for in what 
theatre in England or the English-speaking 
world shall joy be found? Yet a sturdy hope 
weaves the two words into one sentence on 
the threshold of a book, that they may meet 
again in men's minds and, in due course, bring 
the things themselves together. Men create 
everything in their own image and always get 
exactly what they deserve, neither more nor 
less. The sins of the fathers are visited upon 
the children in art as in everything else, and 
the English nation deserves the English 

i % theatre. 



theatre. That, however, is no reason why 
such a theatre should be endured, and there 
are signs that it will not much longer be 
suffered to continue unchanged. All over the 
world it is being discovered that what was 
good enough for the fathers is not good enough 
for the children, and a generation is springing 
into manhood which demands the right to 
examine its heritage and to discard everything 
that it finds to be worthless, useless and injuri- 
ous. This generation is discovering that it 
is possible to rebel against the sins of its for- 
bears and it is rebelling with all its might. 
If in the delighted excitement of the struggle 
it rebels also against their virtues, experience 
will bring wisdom and keener perception, and 
the very violence of the revolt will clear the 
air and leave the next generation and the next 
and the next more free for constructive 
action. Meanwhile there has been and is per- 
ception enough to see that the life of men can- 
not be changed until a change has been 
wrought in their minds, and to bring this about 
2 



there is no other instrument than art. Re- 
ligion without art is like a ship without sails. 
Education is the preparation of the human 
mind for the understanding of art and, 
through art, of life. Art is devised for the 
correction of those errors into which a man's 
senses lead him, errors which, uncorrected, 
gather into a crust upon his soul and prevent 
his entering into communication with his 
fellow-men. Good art dissolves such errors; 
bad art multiplies them. Bad art has always 
been used as an escape from life; good art 
admits of no escape and forces a man to see 
himself in a glass clearly. A bad man likes 
bad art, for good art shows him to himself as 
grotesque, and he flies from the reflection and 
does his best to procure the suppression of the 
artist, and fees unscrupulous men to show him 
a lying and flattering reflection. Fortunately 
there are no absolutely bad men, and the great 
secret society of the artists, the most powerful 
secret society in the world, because it is open 
and the master of time and death, has been 
3 ^s able 



able wisely and surely to organize so that 
good art survives, while bad art is borne away 
on the backward movement of time. There 
is a constant succession of men bad enough — 
snobs, arrivists, speculators, egoists — to hold 
up the lying mirror of bad art, but ever the 
true mirror of good art wins more to turn to it 
and to see, as they gaze, all that they thought 
hash and pitiless and cruel melt away to leave 
an image of pure beauty. This change is not 
in the mirror but in the minds of those who 
look, and once it has been brought about, they 
can no more fall back into those errors of the 
senses, towards deliverance from which the 
whole activity of mankind has from the very 
beginning been directed, and they move into 
the vanguard of the march towards the im- 
mortality of the free spirit of man. The con- 
structive work of the world is directed by the 
artists. Scientists, inventors, engineers, manu- 
facturers, organizers, even wholesale grocers, 
do their bidding, though they have no taste 
for poetry or painting or music or sculpture 
4 



and believe that the laws which govern their 
success or failure are purely economic. The 
business is always the outcome of the dream. 
% There was bound to come a point in human 
progress when the dream and the business 
should of moral necessity begin to approach 
each other more nearly, when such a degree of 
material liberty should be reached as would 
be intolerably empty without its complement 
of spiritual liberty, without, that is, the joy 
which is the outcome of those two liberties. 
It is of small immediate consequence to the 
man who is the slave of the business whether 
the dream be true or no. He had liefer be 
drugged with lies than made to see and feel 
his slavery, be it in poverty or in wealth. So 
long as a man is the victim of the tyranny of 
the necessary material work of the world, he 
cannot have the energy to desire the truth, and 
to appease the restricted and small appetite 
of his mind the sweetmeats of untruth will 
seem to suffice, though such debauchery must 
bring its inevitable consequence of atrophy 
5 ^s and 



and spiritual death. On the other hand it is 
rarely that the diseased appetite is so far gone 
as to be beyond cure, and, outside the deliber- 
ate exploiters of humanity, there can be very 
few men who are impervious to the truth of 
art and the truth of life. 
$K Now, for the organization of the forces 
of truth there is one machine to hand, the 
theatre, in which, properly controlled, all the 
arts can find the freedom and the strength of 
co-operation. There is no other machine. 
The Churches long ago adopted the methods 
of the theatre in the performance of a series 
of symbolic plays, in which audience and 
actors, or congregation and priests, collabo- 
rate in worship of the Universal Presence. 
These performances, these symbolic plays, 
however, have become poisoned with dogma 
mechanically and unintelligently repeated, 
politics crystallized and formulated, and fixed 
ethical ideas. They have been debased, and 
not the Universal Presence but the symbol 
is worshipped, and, for long enough, there has 
6 



been no room in the Church for art, and such 
art as has been able to creep in has been 
screwed down to fit the Church's formula. 
*% Neither for long enough, and for similar 
reasons, has there been room for art in the 
theatre, where also the machinery consists of 
collaboration between audience and perform- 
ers in worship, i. e. the creation of joy in the 
Universal Presence. In the theatre as in the 
Church the machinery is abused, and not joy, 
but animal laughter or sentimental tears only 
are created. The use of the machinery of 
both Church and theatre is inartistic and 
therefore irreligious. The one begets un- 
wholesome fear and dread, the other frivolity 
and a spirit of mockery; and fear and mockery 
make of human beings an easy prey to the 
forces of evil. 

% In the present state of society everybody, 
except a few artists, is both exploiter and 
exploited, so that the energy of the human 
race runs in a vicious circle and is hardly at all 
productive of sound achievement; profits are 
7 % estimated 



estimated only in terms of money and every 
standard is falsified. The majority of men 
are mimetic and slaves, where they should be 
free and creative of love, joy, affection and 
friendship, of which great things, in their 
fight against evil, art is the by-product and 
undying memorial. The standards natural to 
mankind, the standards of our inborn joy, can 
only be restored by the artists, and by the 
artists in co-operation and in possession of 
an integral part of the social machine — either 
the Church or the theatre, or both. Social 
evolution follows the evolution of art. 
Hitherto it has followed at a distance, at the 
distance of several generations; but a great 
change has come over the world. Hopes, be- 
liefs, prejudices, ideas, that once sufficed for 
a whole generation, are now exhausted in five 
years. Men are excited, restless, busy, per- 
turbed, certain of new conquests, yet impatient 
to appraise their value. We have entered the 
Promised Land. The great men of the Vic- 
torian Age had a vision of it from Mount 



Nebo. We are still too thrilled with the de- 
light and novelty of it all. We have re- 
nounced their vision and are occupied with 
detail, with the gardens, and the vineyards, 
and the partition of the land; we are bewil- 
dered too to find that the processes of our exist- 
ence are going on unchanged, bringing the 
same satisfactions and the same complications, 
the same joys and sorrows, as in the wilderness. 
We had hoped to find ourselves different and 
lo! we are the same, only with a more urgent 
need of authority, a more imperative and 
crushing desire to discover the truth of our- 
selves, the extent of our capacity, and our 
exact relation to the powers that brought us to 
such might and dominion. We are being 
forced to admit the authority and the divine 
truth of art, to perceive that the inspiration of 
Beethoven, for instance, is no less authentic 
than that of Jesus of Nazareth and His 
Apostles. In such necessity, we can no longer 
be content with a social evolution remotely de- 
pendent upon the evolution of art through the 
o % scattered 



scattered efforts of artists working in isolation 
and wretchedness. We are forced to turn to 
them for joy and enlightenment and disci- 
pline, for all that feeds and sustains our imag- 
ination. It is not enough for us to turn 
individually, each man seeking out this book 
or that picture. We live in herds; our joy 
must be collective, and collectively we must 
turn to those men in whom joy is strongest, 
those men who have the art to share their joy 
with us. 

% This desire, this impulse of ours, will meet 
the desire and the impulse of the artists in the 
theatre and we shall make of it a place of 
worship, of worship delightful and amusing 
and joyous and various, so that it will become 
the very heart and centre of human society, 
from which all our activities will radiate. 
Just as the heart renews and purifies the blood, 
so will the theatre renew and purify human 
energy. Pure in its source, human energy is 
contaminated and clogged by fixed ideas, the 
debased formulae of the Church, with its 
10 



exaltation of fear, and the horrid, mocking 
spirit of bad art, and therefore all its products 
are impure. There is nothing invented or 
contrived for the well-being of human kind 
but it is instantly abused. Politicians, philos- 
ophers, and reformers are for ever trying to 
force systems of thought, of social existence, 
of economics, upon human life from without, 
only to see them absorbed and swept along by 
the circular stream of exploitation. Purifica- 
tion can only come from within. 

II 

% IT is the artists who have led us to this 
Promised Land of the twentieth century, the 
artists who have landed us in this chaos where- 
in heatedly we talk of wars and industrial 
strife and social injustice, the artists who step 
by step have dragged us up from brutal ac- 
ceptance of the world's extremities of heat and 
cold and hunger and thirst, to the confused 
civilization which is the delight of the eco- 
nomic mind. There is no reason to doubt 
ii ^3 that 



that they will lead us further yet and give us 
the reality rather than the dream of human 
brotherhood. In the meantime we have the 
right to ask and we do ask for as much fun by 
the way as can be procured. We look to the 
artists not only for vision but for amusement. 
We are so eager for it that we are over-tolerant 
and suffer the charlatan to deceive us rather 
than discard anything that is presented to us 
for delight. The food of our minds is more 
adulterated than the food of our bodies. Our 
large acceptivity makes it always difficult for 
the artist to establish his ascendancy over us, 
but only so and not otherwise can the artist 
obtain the fierce conflict within himself which 
shall forge his dream and his delight into such 
a form that it shall pass into the world's cur- 
rency. Once his ascendancy is established we 
accept the artist's vision and have it stated and 
restated in a thousand different forms by 
minor artists and ephemeral amuseurs until, 
in the course of social evolution, we outgrow 
it, and turn to a vision greater still, or, at least, 
12 



to a vision set forth in terms more intelligible 
to our new temper. 

% We have outgrown the vision by which 
we lived in the wilderness. We are looking 
for new vision in everything. As we have 
found none in the theatre, it has lost its im- 
portance for us, even as a place of light amuse- 
ment. The anarchy of the theatre has been 
the opportunity of the music-hall, which, dur- 
ing the last ten years, has been organized, 
rudely but generously, so that it has become, 
after a fashion, the vehicle of expression of 
the untempered genius of the race. All the 
best and most spontaneous acting in England 
is to be found in the music-hall, where the 
people can see the wonder of their own de- 
light in material things. You shall see the 
First and Second Grave-digger in the music- 
halls, but in that air Hamlet cannot breathe. 
There is no space for brooding here, nor in 
these vast vulgar palaces can the spirit of 
tragedy or the spirit of comedy have its dwell- 
ing. It is the renown more than the art of 
13 tifc Sarah 



Sarah Bernhardt that fills the Coliseum. An 
audience is easily hypnotized by a reputation, 
as easily as the possessor of it. To the music- 
hall the people bring all their naive credulity, 
all their prejudice, all their superstition, and 
these receive good measure of fun and pathos' 
pressed down and brimming over. 
^t The theatre cannot compete with the music- 
hall. It must give its audiences finer fare, 
the food without which the race and its civil- 
ization must perish, the food of the imagi- 
nation. The imagination's appetite is not 
touched by the music-hall. It is the privilege 
of refined and disciplined artists to satisfy it. 
It is the highest of all human privileges, for, 
without imagination, a man cannot live; he 
can only play at living, a game which, as it 
may last for sixty years, is apt to become tedi- 
ous and to lead to agonies of satiety, exhaustion 
and profound dissatisfaction. The theatre, 
like the music-hall, must give pleasure, but a 
finer, a higher, and a keener pleasure. It has 
only the same machinery to hand — that can 



be developed but not altered — but it must use 
it with more subtlety and with greater skill 
and cunning: it must be under the control of 
finer brains. To draw a rough distinction — 
the machinery of the music-hall may use its 
men, but the men of the theatre must use its 
machinery. The music-hall asks for no 
vision in its artists, who will remain carica- 
turists ; the theatre, if it is to live, must have 
the service of men with vision, men with the 
power beautifully to share their vision with 
their audiences, whose spirit during the per- 
formance will be set free by the dissolution 
of their prejudices and superstitions, led for 
the space of a few hours to forgetfulness of 
self and sent back into life enriched by imag- 
inative experience, in courage renewed, and 
therefore more capable of facing and grap- 
pling with life's responsibilities. In this 
sharing in a vision of beauty, in this communal 
confirmation of the instinctive knowledge of 
• truth that lies deep in the heart of every 
human being, consists the joy of the theatre. 
15 %It 



It is this joy that, most often subconsciously, 
every unspoiled and unsophisticated playgoer 
looks for, hopes for, and thrills to as he settles 
in his seat, and already, before the curtain 
rises, begins, out of the information supplied 
on the programme, to create for himself the 
wonderland story in which marvellously he is 
to live and sutler and rejoice. It is this joy 
that for one reason or another — (a study of 
the newspapers will supply them) — he is most 
often denied either wholly or in part. If the 
theatre is a place of art, as not even the most 
fashionable actor dares deny that it should be, 
it is its function to present a picture, as it were, 
in the round, not of that life which the play- 
goer can see in the streets or the law-courts or 
his own or his friends' houses, but an abstrac- 
tion, a sublimation of life, which shall delight 
him first of all by intensely amusing him and 
then, by confirming his instinctive knowledge 
of life, giving the lie to the impression he has 
of it through his senses and his limited capac- 
ity for experience. — (The average man's 
16 



existence does not express his vitality; the 
artist furnishes him with another sphere in 
which to live, in which also to correct the 
mischances and distortions of his mind.) — 
The theatre must not be like "life": it must 
be like the theatre, that is, like the ideal the- 
atre, or as near to it as the limitations of the 
artists in control of it will allow. In any case 
it should always transcend the limitations of 
its audience. 

Ill 

% IT is often objected that the theatre cannot 
have the standards of the other arts since in 
its collective appeal it is dependent for its 
existence upon the capricious approbation of 
the public, and that it is unreasonable to ex- 
pect any large body of men to understand and 
appreciate a work of art until it is a little 
swathed about with tradition and toned down 
with the dust of time. But it is precisely in 
the theatre that a work of art can be most 
nearly approached by the ordinary mind, be- 
17 % cause 



cause it is most fondly familiar with the 
theatre and is there fortified by the presence 
of other ordinary minds all concentrated on 
the same object. For this reason, if the artist's 
vision be translated into terms of the theatre, 
into a fable, into symbols capable of treat- 
ment by the machinery of the theatre there 
will be nothing or little in it that cannot be 
apprehended through the emotional response 
of the audience. For the artist of the theatre 
the essential is that he should trust his audi- 
ence, as Shakespeare trusted his, and as smaller 
writers for the stage do not trust theirs. It is 
only in such trust that drama in all its degrees 
and forms, from tragedy down to farce and 
burlesque, can be created; without it there 
can be nothing but the ingenious manipulation 
of tricks and common-form situations and 
characters, eked out with resplendent trim- 
mings, as in one school in the modern theatre, 
or, as in another, with exposition of irrelevant 
ideas or criticisms of the accidental and pass- 
ing phenomena of existence. In either case 
18 



there must be in the audience so dealt with a 
sense of disproportion, for the machinery of 
the theatre, the vitality and mental energy in 
an audience, are much too great to be used for 
anything save the purposes of drama, which is 
the creation of another life beyond life and 
yet of it, informing it, casting back a radiance 
upon it and revealing, if not its purpose, at 
least its force and intensity. Failing, under 
pressure of divers necessities, to perceive this 
purpose, or to move towards it, the directors 
of the modern theatres have come to a sort of 
compact with their indulgent and ever-chang- 
ing public, that the theatre shall be used only 
for laughter, in season and out. That were 
well enough if such laughter were provoked 
honestly and in sheer fun, but in the decadent 
theatre of London, New York and Paris real 
fun is far to seek and there is a grim trade in 
laughter, in joyless mirth, relieved only here 
and there by the native drollery of some indi- 
vidual performer, who, relying solely upon 
his own personality, fighting against the soul- 
19 %less 



less organization which brings him into the 
public view, is soon exhausted and brought 
either to impotence or to a dull conventional- 
ization of his humour. And so it is with all 
talent, of actors and dramatists alike; it is 
sacrificed to this base compact and trade in 
laughter. And yet there comes to the theatre 
a succession of new generations of playgoers, 
audiences potentially fine and alert, bringing 
to their pleasure a naive and almost joyous 
quality, believing in the heroes and heroines, 
being hypnotized by the charm and glitter of 
the machinery and not at all critical of the use 
of it that they find, finally suffering disillusion 
and turning away to the music-hall and to 
literature and the other arts. Not yet has 
there arisen in the theatre an artist or a band 
of artists strong enough to meet a new genera- 
tion of playgoers and to whip their enthusiasm 
and delight, their desire for joy into joy, upon 
the wave of which both can be carried to 
higher and yet higher and more magnificent 
achievement. Not yet. . . . But there is con- 
20 



tinual effort and continual striving, a steady 
stream of hope and desire. More ; there is in 
many hearts and minds the faith that such a 
thing will be, faith that, once springing forth 
in mind and heart, never yet failed to find its 
way into the world of form. We are only at 
the beginning. We have only just entered the 
new region of the mind. Consider our habits, 
how we live. Rightly or wrongly — (and 
when all is told, will it not be seen to be 
right?) — we have gathered ourselves into 
great cities and huge companies of men, where 
we live under a constant stress and pressure 
of circumstances and hurried human contact, 
and we are engaged, each of us, in work so 
specialized that we cannot perceive its effect 
upon the whole, or, indeed, its effect upon our 
own existence, save that it procures us bread 
and living; we have made it easy to pass out 
of these cities, to move from one to the other, 
and we have established communications with 
all parts of the world; our life reacts upon 
the lives of the nations our neighbours, upon 
21 %the 



the lives of nations once thought of dimly as 
barbarians, and therefore hardly kin with us 
at all; each day the new facts, the events of 
the world are presented to us; the life of the 
individual touches the life of humanity at so 
many points as to make selection and action 
well-nigh impossible except through habit and 
under the constraint of the general action. 
Such an existence has produced excitement, a 
desire to know more, an appreciation of the 
relation of the individual to the race, and an 
eagerness for better fellowship — in fine, curi- 
osity; instinct urging every individual to for- 
tify himself for the larger life which dimly he 
perceives to be opening up before him. In- 
stinct lands the individual in strange places, 
but always he is seeking one thing only — 
vitality, with which to withstand the strain of 
his existence. He is seeking genius, and he 
welcomes everything that helps or seems to 
help him to understand it and make some of 
it his own. There is professorial authority 
for saying that no man destitute of genius 

22 



could live for a day. It should not be neces- 
sary to back such a statement with authority, 
professorial or other, so evident is its truth 
from each man's knowledge of himself. Yet 
the word "genius" has been so misappropriated 
and abused by quacks and charlatans that the 
busy layman starts from it, for he is "once bit- 
ten, twice shy" and is fearful of spontaneity 
in all its forms, fearful, while, in spite of 
himself, he craves for it. "Genius is spon- 
taneity, the life of the soul asserting itself 
triumphantly in the midst of dead things." 
Vision is as much a natural function of man 
as digestion; vision is that function which 
raises a man above the rest of creation, and, if 
it be not exercised, produces the most disas- 
trous results upon the health of body and mind. 
Artists are those who, by fidelity to their 
genius, their vision, preserve their health, and, 
in so doing, help to maintain the health of the 
body politic and give it a standard of health. 
An artist is not a creature apart; he is a hu- 
man being who is human. He lives by cour- 
23 %age 



age where others live by fear. His free 
genius — free in articulation — sounds the cry 
of "Onward! Upward!" to the stifled and over- 
laid genius in common men. 
4% Above all things men desire health. Only 
genius can give it them. The peasant, the 
savage existence affords no sufficient expres- 
sion for a man's power of life or his religious 
aspiration. Genius has led him to civiliza- 
tion, made life a finer instrument for the ex- 
pression of the reality from which it springs, 
but has not yet taught him how to use it, how 
even to use that which he has so that he may 
not be defeated by that which he shall have 
hereafter, or how to make his own small life 
harmonious with the great Being of which it 
is a part. 

$ts Ordinary men are deluged day by day with 
facts. They need a touchstone which can en- 
dow them with meaning, kindle them, make 
them pregnant with significance for each man 
according to his needs. To such a state of 
mind no man can be brought except in that 
24 



mood and condition of pleasure which de- 
lights him into receptivity and pure accept- 
ance, that mood in which he feels "smil- 
ingly from top to toe," an easy, delicious, 
soaring ecstasy. That he can only come by 
under the powerful and rare domination of 
art, and such domination is most easily estab- 
lished over him in the theatre where he is, so 
to speak, abstracted from his everyday exist- 
ence and forced to concentrate his mind and 
his senses upon one object. 
$k Without knowing it, the modern impulse 
of exfoliation is taking men towards the 
theatre. Faith will not admit of doubt that, 
when they come to it, they will find it equipped 
and all prepared to give them the joy that they 
have come to seek. 

% Life, that succession of opportunities, has 
brought us to a greater opportunity than has 
ever been offered to us before. We shall not 
fail in it or to turn it to account, though we 
may fail in much that we seem to perceive in 
our excited dreams, for always we cast our 
25 % thoughts 



thoughts beyond what we can perform, be- 
yond what it is meet that we should do. Ever 
at the extremity of our thoughts there lies a 
thought that we cannot interpret, though, with- 
out its light, our own do but intensify our 
darkness. Only through the refinement and 
discipline of our thoughts in art can we ap- 
proach it. In the effort to procure this refine- 
ment and this discipline lies the health that all 
men desire. 

IV 
% ASSUMING then that the tremendous 
energy now manifesting itself in human affairs 
is purposeful, assuming that we are something 
more than the victims of a blind force in 
eruption, that we are capable of translating 
into our own terms something at least of the 
intentions of the Contriver of the Universe, 
and have organized the humbler processes of 
life in order that we may live it with more 
profit to ourselves and greater usefulness to 
the general plan of which we are and must 
26 



ever remain in ignorance; assuming that in 
this impulse there is evidence of a general 
desire in the civilized world to use the theatre 
as a place of delight and harmony and order, 
what is there being done in the theatre 
to meet that desire? If the audiences are 
emerging, are the artists prepared? Are they 
preparing? Is the potential desire of the au- 
diences attaining consciousness in them? . . . 
The answer to all these questions is, I think, 
that in the few great dramatists of genius, 
in Shakespeare, Sophocles, Euripides, Aris- 
tophanes, Ibsen, Moliere, Lope da Vega, 
Tschekov, Synge, consciousness has been 
reached and expressed in form, while the 
theatre has always been so disorganized as 
never to give the work of any of them full 
value in performance. For generations now 
in his own country the plays of Shakespeare 
have been made as dull as his own Polonius ; 
under Irving a pageant with a strange, 
interesting, and romantic figure wandering 
through it; under his followers and imitators, 
27 tifca 



a pageant. It is probable that the English 
theatre will not be able to exercise its real 
function until these, the greatest plays in the 
world, are released from the bad tradition 
with which they are encrusted, and already, 
under pressure from Russia and Germany, 
efforts are being made in London towards 
this achievement, and as the dramatist is liber- 
ated, so will the actor be thrust from the place 
he has usurped in the theatre's economy, from 
which he has checked and repressed all de- 
velopment even in his own branch of the art. 
In the theatre the interpreters have dominated 
the creators to such an extent that really crea- 
tive men have not been suffered to enter it 
and for many years now only those men have 
written plays who have been content to trim 
their work to fit the personal and technical 
limitations of the modish actors of the mo- 
ment, with the result that the actors have be- 
come indolent and incapable of loyalty even 
to those writers whom they have consented to 
employ. The best acting is that which most 
28 



loyally serves the dramatist and the better the 
dramatist the better will the acting be. 
^fe The indolence of the actor has brought 
about decay and an inevitable reaction, from 
which has arisen a functionary called the pro- 
ducer, whose duty it is to impose discipline 
upon the performance of the play, to grasp the 
play's imaginative idea and rhythm and to see 
to it that nothing in the work of actors or de- 
signers impedes its free action upon the minds 
of the audience. Unfortunately so many 
modern plays have neither imaginative idea 
nor rhythm that the producer is often forced 
to concern himself with elaboration of detail 
and the contrivance of "business" or mechan- 
ical devices to disguise the poverty of the ac- 
tion. The producer should simplify; under 
modern conditions, as a rule, he does but com- 
plicate by sacrificing the will of the dramatist 
to the will of the actors, or, again, where the 
producer becomes sufficiently powerful, he 
subordinates the will of both dramatist and 
actor to his own conception and concentrates, 
29 %oa 



on spectacle. It is conceivable that the pro- 
ducer himself might be a dramatist, capable 
of using the elements of the art of the theatre 
■ — sound, light, and movement — to create a 
drama, employing his actors only as puppets 
and dispensing with the written drama alto- 
gether. It is conceivable, it is desirable, and 
there is no reason why such a drama should not 
coexist with the drama that is conceived and 
elaborated in the study and translated into 
terms of the theatre through the work of pro- 
ducer, actors and decorators. In the house 
of art there are many mansions and there is 
room for every kind of work, for every com- 
bination of author, producer and actor, except 
that which delivers the theatre into the hands 
of the actor, and on condition that every effort 
be directed towards service of the dramatic 
idea. Where the producer dispenses with the 
dramatist, it is, or should be, only because he 
himself is a dramatist; but such a producer 
will be very rare. It might be said that an 
actor like Irving was his own dramatist and 
30 



there would be some truth in it. Every good 
music-hall comedian — Mr. Harry Lauder or 
Mr. George Formby — is his own dramatist, 
as Irving was, but such men have no medium 
save their own personalities and cannot there- 
fore both be themselves and not themselves, 
cannot use a play or other material except as 
an adjunct to themselves and cannot there- 
fore use the machinery of the theatre to 
create an artistic whole. For such men the 
machinery of the music-hall has been evolved. 
They can charm their audiences, hypnotize 
them, but they cannot give them joy except 
their charm be brought into relation quite 
clearly with the dramatic idea, which is a 
play. 

$fc The machinery of the modern music-hall 
has been created for those artists who can 
work only in the medium of their own 
personalities acting directly upon the minds 
of their audiences without reference to any- 
thing else or to anything larger than them- 
selves. From such men the theatre will soon 
31 <%be 



be entirely delivered by the music-hall, which 
not only offers them greater rewards but 
relieves them of responsibility and gives them 
a more effective method of attack for their 
purposes. Relieved of these men, the theatre, 
if it is to live at all, must be served by drama- 
tists and producers and producer-dramatists 
who do not themselves appear upon the stage 
but use it to express the ideas by which they 
are possessed. So conducted and only so can 
the theatre meet the demands made on it by 
J. M. Synge in his preface to The Tinker's 
Wedding: 

%, "The drama is made serious — in the 
French sense of the word — not by the degree 
in which it is taken up with problems that 
are serious in themselves, but by the degree 
in which it gives the nourishment, not very 
easy to define, on which our imaginations 
live. We should not go to the theatre as we 
go to a chemist's or a dram-shop, but as we 
go to a dinner, where the food we need is 
taken with pleasure and excitement. 
32 



'% "The drama, like the symphony, does not 
teach or prove anything. Analysts with their 
problems and teachers with their systems are 
soon as old-fashioned as the pharmacopoeia 
of Galen — look at Ibsen and the Germans — 
but the best plays of Ben Jonson and Moliere 
can no more go out of fashion than the black- 
berries on the hedges. 

% "Of the things which nourish the imagi- 
nation, humour is one of the most needful, 
and it is dangerous to limit or destroy it." 
% To handle serious drama at all, to present 
it so that there shall be no discord between 
the dramatic idea and its interpretation, a 
theatre should be as well-disciplined as a 
ship, for a ship it is, indeed, one in which 
wondrous voyages are taken out upon the 
high seas of the mind. Every theatre should 
be under the control of a director who is 
familiar with every detail of its construction, 
a man who, without being himself a creative 
artist, is immediately and subtly responsive 
to art. This director should be served by a 
33 ^number 



number of highly trained producers, a suffi- 
cient company of actors, designers, scene- 
painters, machinists, dressmakers, all of 
whom should, by competent work, be able to 
earn a reasonably secure living, independ- 
ently of the success of this or that perform- 
ance, for, if he be harassed by financial 
anxiety, no man can give of his best. 
% Theatres roughly corresponding to these 
requirements are beginning to spring up in the 
provinces in England, in Manchester, Liver- 
pool, Birmingham, also in Dublin, and there 
will soon be no great industrial centre in the 
country that has not its own theatre more or 
less independent of the London commercial 
traffic in entertainments; Russia has an ad- 
mirable Art Theatre in Moscow, and in 
Germany they are building in many towns 
small theatres for modern realistic plays and 
larger houses for classic and poetic drama; 
there are Little Theatres in Chicago and New 
York holding out ambitious programmes; 
order is beginning to shine through chaos, 
34 



but still the workers in the theatre are under 
the tyranny of the old superstitions, still 
lacking courage and clear perception of the 
new — the age-old — spirit, still inclined to be 
content with success, and, when they have 
won it, be fearful of losing it by carrying 
the idea any further — the old trouble of each 
revolutionary leader desiring the revolution 
to end in himself, so that Danton must gobble 
up Mirabeau, Marat Danton, Robespierre 
Marat, and so on, until a master comes whose 
tyranny may be worse than the old. The 
trouble in the theatre is that each ambitious 
revolutionary specializes and admits to his 
theatre only a special audience, by his fanat- 
icism holds the general audience at arm's 
length, wastes energy, and in the end destroys 
his own usefulness by raging against the 
barrier of his own erection, the barrier be- 
tween himself and his own vision and work. 
And meanwhile the old enemy of artistic en- 
thusiasm, the spirit of mockery inherent in 
human nature, enters into the fray and com- 
35 ^spletes 



pletes the work of destruction. It has been 
so in every effort of the human race to rise 
to a higher level of existence. Perhaps it is 
inevitable, a necessary limitation and check, 
a precaution to ensure that each generation 
shall have its allotted task and shall not find 
it too easy. All human activity seems to run 
in cycles — a romantic period of huge en- 
deavour, a classic period of fruitfulness and 
peace, and a period of decadence when the 
race descends from its high achievement and 
plunges down into the lower air, only to rise 
to achievement higher yet. In the theatre 
we are at the beginning of a romantic period. 
The time is passing when even men of in- 
telligence and culture will tolerate in the 
theatre blunders and stupidities which would 
not for a moment be endured in any other 
art. The time is coming when the theatre 
will be a place of art, an exchange of ideas, 
the subtlest and finest engine of society, the 
first to feel, to express and to inform new de- 
sire, new vision, new impulse and new hope. 

36 



V 
% THERE is nothing new under the sun, 
but if the world be clearly envisaged, every- 
thing in it appears eternally new, wonderful 
and lovely. The future can only be built up 
on the present as the present is built up on 
the past. The difficulty in discussing any 
change, particular or general, is that, if the 
arguments for it be presented so persuasively 
as to carry conviction, those who are con- 
vinced begin at once to ask and to look for 
concrete, shapely results, and they are disap- 
pointed if there do not immediately arise a 
new heaven and a new earth, entirely differ- 
ent in quality and substance from the old, 
and, these never being forthcoming, they 
lose heart if they are told that they will be 
lucky to have the change becoming per- 
ceptible in their grandchildren. This diffi- 
culty is very great in dealing with the theatre, 
which has fallen into such contempt that even 
the best of those who work in it hardly be- 
lieve in it at all, and certainly have no con- 
37 % fidence 



fidence in the possibility of such audiences as 
would make a real theatre feasible. When 
the enthusiast upholds a glowing picture of 
the future of the theatre, and informs his 
thrilling auditors that it is a matter of many 
generations, then their hearts sink and they 
look back and say: "Yes, but look at all the 
movements of the past thirty years. They 
have all ended in the very thing they set out 
to destroy, the substitution of the standards 
of success for the standards of art. They 
have all ended by being concerned, not with 
the theatre, but only with its appendages and 
trimmings, with its outward aspect. You 
may change the outward aspect of a rotten 
thing, you have to change it for each genera- 
tion, but what is the use of dragging in ideals 
and dreams and other irrelevancies, if the 
thing itself remains always the same? And 
after all, if things never change, is it worth 
all this talk and all this effort to which you 
are trying to lead us?" . . . To which the 
reply is this: "Things always remain the 

38 



same until we change, and that we cannot 
help doing. The spirit in which we ap- 
proach the world and all in it is for ever chang- 
ing as we change and grow and develop new 
powers of life, clearer vision, and more of 
what Matthew Arnold called 'sweetness and 
light.' " Every new development that takes 
place within us is infallibly expressed in every 
one of our institutions and in the use we make 
of them. Not for nothing do we have men 
of genius. Nor for nothing have we had 
Blake, Whitman, Nietzsche, and, in the 
theatre, Shakespeare, Wagner, Ibsen. Each 
of these men has found new joys in life and 
by his work has made the world free of them, 
at the cost of effort, a small effort compared 
with the mighty struggles that first wrested 
these joys from life. The spirit of bold and 
courageous and imaginative development 
that animates all men of genius no more ends 
than it begins with them. It is as old as hu- 
manity. Through the ages it has gathered 
consciousness in our minds and hearts, but 
39 % only 



only here and there has it found full expres- 
sion. Our institutions are for ever being 
adapted to give it freer scope, but they are 
never adapted without pain and suffering, 
without injury to our habits or damage to 
vested interests. To this spirit, to the genius 
of the human race, the theatre has for genera- 
tions been closed. Folly and cowardice and 
egoism and vanity have barred the doors 
against it, and, for want of it, the theatre has 
been stricken with a sickness that seems mor- 
tal. Its old small function of giving light 
amusement has been taken from it. It is 
stretching its limbs for the exercise of its 
higher function of giving serious, i.e. imagi- 
native amusement. It is still under the stress 
of revolt, so that it is difficult to see the gleams 
of that joy which is seeking expression in it. 
Hardly in Europe is there a single artist of 
the theatre devoted to sane, secure, delighted 
and delightful achievement in his art; very 
few are there indeed who are beginning to 
shake free of the realism which for the last 
40 






fifty years has seemed to kill the joy of all 
the arts, while in truth it has been riddling 
and scattering the false joy of the academies, 
and leaving art at rest for a long period of 
incubation. All art is a matter of convention, 
of agreement between artist and public as to 
the meaning of certain symbols. When the 
current symbols grow debased and lose their 
shining and luminous quality, honest artists 
return from their art to life, investigate it, 
analyse it, mark its progress, to discover why 
the old symbols have lost their meaning. 
Such a period is a kind of winter: plays, nov- 
els, pictures, music, are used as a sort of seed- 
bed, in which hundreds and thousands of 
germs are planted from which in the spring — 
the new growth of art — only the healthiest 
stocks will be selected. It has been finely 
said: "Why weep over the ruins of art? 
They are not worth it. Art is the shadow 
man casts on nature. . . . From time to time, 
a genius, in passing contact with the earth, 
suddenly perceives the torrent of reality over- 
41 % flowing 



flowing the continents of art. The dykes 
crack for a moment. Nature creeps in 
through a fissure. But at once the gap is 
stopped up. It must be done to safeguard the 
reason of mankind. It would perish if its eyes 
met the eyes of Jehovah. Then once more 
it begins to strengthen the walls of its cell, 
which nothing enters from without except it 
have first been wrought upon." . . . Just as 
without habit a man cannot but go mad, so 
without convention an artist cannot shape his 
inspiration into a definite image for the minds 
of his audience, and just as a man becomes 
the slave of his habits, so an artist may become 
the slave of his conventions, and his work, 
reaching the other extremity, becomes mean- 
ingless. In revolt against the tyranny of old 
conventions an artist is too much beset by 
moods of self-distrust to be able to win 
through to the mood of serenity in which 
works of art alone are possible. But, in the 
force of his revolt, he may achieve works 
valuable in destructive quality, or in the 
42 



marshalling of detail, or even in the opening 
up of some new way along which the mind 
can travel; yet all such work cannot be pre- 
sented to a general audience, for it has not 
the basis of trust and confidence upon which 
artists and audiences can meet. Such work 
will often achieve a sort of success of fashion, 
but it can never achieve the success of art, 
which has hardly a worse enemy than fashion 
with its snobbism and sheepish insincerity. 
Whether it succeeds or no, sincere work is 
always valuable, and in the European theatre 
there is abundance of such busy, sincere, in- 
telligent work as to justify the most ardent 
hopes that at last the sleeping giant of the 
drama is stirring to his waking hour. 
% The French are a great analytical people, 
the testers of ideas and inspirations. It was 
a Frenchman, Edouard Manet, who began 
the liberation of modern painting from the 
dominion of the conventions of the schools. 
It was a Frenchman, Villiers de l'lsle Adam, 
who was the greatest and most vigorous of 
43 % the 



the early deliverers of the drama from its 
captivity. It was a Frenchman also in whom 
the impulse that has found its expression in 
the dancing of Isadora Duncan, the Russian 
Ballet, and the Eurhythmies of M. Jacques 
Dalcloze, first reached consciousness. The 
intellectual force of the one, the instinctive 
and emotional force of the other, have pro- 
duced two great streams of activity in the 
theatre, the realistic and the spectacular, both 
of which are at present engaging the atten- 
tion of Mr. Granville Barker in London, 
Herr Max Reinhardt in Berlin, M. Rouche 
in Paris, and, the greatest of all, Stanislawski 
in Moscow. In the English-speaking world 
the dramatic work of Mr. Bernard Shaw, 
Mr. John Galsworthy and Mr. Granville 
Barker, fortified by the Irish school inspired 
by Yeats and Synge, has led to the establish- 
ment of Repertory Theatres in the English 
provinces, and of Little Theatres in New 
York and Chicago. The Art Theatre in 
Moscow is devoted chiefly to the production 
44 



of realistic plays, like those of Tschekov and 
Gorky, but this theatre has also the distinc- 
tion of being the first to have a Shakespearean 
production by Mr. Gordon Craig, with his 
newest ideas and his screens. Germany is^ 
perhaps better equipped than any country in 
the number of its advanced theatres and in 
their scientific erection and their furnishing 
to meet modern requirements. 
% Still, with all this business, with all these 
manifestations of vitality, the theatre is only 
on the point of emerging. It is still far from 
taking its rightful place in the life of the 
civilized world. Its art is still, as it were, 
suspended between life and the old conven- 
tions of the theatre. The dramatists are still 
too timid, too self-conscious, to stand on 
their own feet as dramatists, to do their work 
for its own sake, and, with the exception of 
a few young men who are groping their way 
to a poetic drama, they seek to fortify their 
plays by writing them with reference to the 
problems and the passing ideas and excite- 
45 % ments 



ments of the day, and to each and every sug- 
gestion for the amelioration of life, without 
considering whether these things tend to the 
improvement of their art. The intellectual 
position of the artist is and will be for many 
years too perilous for him to take the salto 
mortal e beyond thought and beyond analysis 
up to the region in which works of art spring 
into being, and in his immediate predecessors 
there has not been any achievement solid 
enough to have laid the suspicions of the 
public and dissipated his own distrust of him- 
self and so with irresistible force to urge him 
with easy, confident mastery of himself to 
mould his material into form. In the theatre 
proper in this country there has as yet been 
no work done that can be regarded as free 
of the defects inevitable in a period of attack 
and reconstruction, — want of form, want of 
humour, want of serenity — no work that really 
reaches and feeds the imagination of the 
people and gives them both a feeling of 
security and a footing in the new world of 

4 6 



art, to the opening up of which so many good 
lives have been given. From the opera, how- 
ever, from the opera turning to spectacle, 
has come work which really is achievement, 
work in which the modern impulses have had 
the freest play to create in the theatre, in 
artists and audience, the nearest approach to 
the joy of the world's seeking that has yet 
been forthcoming. Painting and music are 
without doubt the healthiest of the arts in 
modern Europe. In the Russian Ballet, these 
two arts, at their most advanced, have been 
admitted to the theatre and turned most 
richly to account in the service of its idea, 
its purpose. Not all the productions of 
the Russians have been satisfying, but in 
Petrouchka, thanks to the genius of Stravinsky 
and Fokin, painting and music, interpreting 
and being interpreted by dancing and mim- 
ing, have been led in marvellous proportion 
to serve the central dramatic idea. In 
Petrouchka everything serves, nothing im- 
pinges upon the effect of the whole. It is 
47 ^shapely, 



shapely, clear, forceful and dynamic. It 
shows, better than any other piece of work of 
the last ten years, the capacity of the theatre 
as an instrument of art, and, also, in its almost 
perfection, how near we are to reaping the 
fruits of the efforts of those who have devoted 
their energies to the theatre's redemption. 
Most usefully might Petrouchka be com- 
pared to Coppelia. Each is excellent of its 
kind, but there is as much difference between 
them as there is between Gluck and Offen- 
bach, or between a magnificently ordered din- 
ner and a meal of sweetmeats. The one 
inspires, the other charms. The one exists 
by its own inspiration, the other is referable 
back to other works of art in the same kind. 
Both are the histories of dolls, but Petrouchka 
gains in intensity as a criticism of life by so 
being; the other is not far from remaining al- 
together in the world of inanimate and con- 
trived things. The one deals with life at 
first hand, translating it almost perfectly into 
symbols, while the other deals with symbols 



so familiar that their power to reflect life is 
dimmed. 

^fc The Russian Ballet, passing from capital 
to capital, has given the workers in the theatre 
the inspiration and the revelation that they 
needed to lift them beyond their experiments 
in realism and analysis, and it has given a 
new zest to the public by providing them with 
a pleasure keener than any that has been 
known in the theatre for generations, a 
pleasure so keen that critics and public are 
beginning a little unjustly to ask if there is 
really any greater merit in the politico-intel- 
lectual realism of the modern school than in 
the clever trickery of Scribe and Sardou. 
But, after a period of decadence and inani- 
tion, art must force its way back to life before 
it can be infused with the vitality necessary 
for its new flight towards the truth. It can 
only do so slowly, laboriously, painfully, 
forcing its way through or under the thou- 
sand and one obstacles, often taking the most 
surprising turns and using the most unex- 
49 % pec ted 



pected means. Art, like life, is not reason- 
able. Like life, it turns even decay to profit. 
Through the most devious ways the art of 
the theatre has forced its way back from exile 
into the theatre, bringing with it colour and 
music and painting and dancing, intelligence, 
proportion, imagination, poetry, the coura- 
geous desire and hope of all artists to serve 
the drama and to assist in laying before the 
world such a feast of joy and loveliness as 
men have hardly ventured to dream of before. 
Best of all is the knowledge through the Rus- 
sian Ballet that the world is prepared to re- 
joice in the feast and to ask for more and more 
of it, all as rich and varied and life-giving as 
possible. 

% At the risk of being tiresome, it must be 
repeated that the feast will not, cannot, be 
new in substance. The human race has many 
thousands of years yet to live before it can 
reach a spirit, a quality of genius, higher than 
that of Shakespeare or Sophocles or any man 
of supremity, but, whereas, in the past, the 
50 



feast of art has been spread out over immense 
spaces of time, often over many generations, 
now, since a larger proportion of men are ad- 
mitted to art, there will be in any one genera- 
tion sufficient desire, sufficient aspiration and 
ardour, for the whole feast to be laid before 
them. That there will be sufficient articulate 
genius to supply the demand cannot be 
doubted, for there is enough unexplored and 
uninterpreted genius in Shakespeare alone to 
keep many generations in active delight. But 
the seeming swifter passage of time — (due to 
life's greater fullness) — must necessitate in 
the theatre finer efficiency and skill in those 
men of talent whose work it is to state and re- 
state in a thousand different forms the divina- 
tion and the achievement of genius. It is this 
greater efficiency in the men of talent, in 
their more sensitive response to the animat- 
ing spirit of the art they serve, — the actors, . 
the producers, the decorators — that will make 
the most obvious difference between the new 
theatre and the old, for in their harmonious 
51 % co-operation 



co-operation they will bring forth the joy 
that is now latent in the theatre, the joy that 
is in every good play, every sincere piece of 
acting, every genuine design, the joy which 
unfortunately is now obscured by the dis- 
location of the theatre's machinery, as the 
result of which nothing is ever placed or ever 
wrought to its finest form, and everything is 
sacrificed to individual caprice or commercial 
rapacity. For all that, there is so little be- 
tween the theatre as it is and the theatre as 
it might be, that a puff of wind, a favourable 
accident, a sudden turn of popular favour 
could at any moment cause it to veer round 
and show its true face to the world. Until 
that has happened, in spite of all the honest 
endeavour and earnest effort of the workers 
in it, the theatre can only continue to live 
the stealthy and rather parasitical life to 
which it has been condemned by modern civ- 
ilization. 



52 



VI 

% THE art of the theatre is a combination 
of many arts fused by the dramatic sense, 
without which the result of combination can 
only be a compromise as dull as that of any 
club or society of men which has lost all per- 
ception and sense of the idea which originally 
brought them together. Without the dra- 
matic sense, the result of such combination of 
the arts can only appear in something less than 
each art separately; like a committee, the in- 
telligence of which is that of its least intelli- 
gent member divided by the number of its 
constituents. Not every artist has the dra- 
matic sense, which I can but roughly define 
as an instinctive power to divine and lead 
and merge into one entity, through the delight 
his skill can give to their senses, the collective 
vitality of an audience. He is a man of the 
theatre in whom this power is sufficiently de- 
veloped for him to use and control it to do his 
will. To such a man nothing is necessary 
save a stage and an audience. What he puts 
53 % upon 



upon the stage, whatever combination of 
sound, light and movement, will be so manipu- 
lated as to be recognizably a play, that is, a 
microcosm altogether separate from the uni- 
verse outside and yet containing in its essence, 
distilled and concentrated, all that the human 
mind can perceive of the wonder, the power, 
and the glory of the mysterious authority that 
lies at the heart of all things. If the artist 
in the theatre has not this sense, he can de- 
velop a sense of the theatre and learn dexter- 
ously to fob his audience off with tricks and 
to lead them to find amusement in solemn trav- 
esty. Between these two processes there is be- 
coming ever more apparent a differentiation 
as sharp and yet as difficult to define as that 
between journalism and literature. These 
two processes can hardly avoid being hostile 
to each other, but, within the theatre, there 
should soon be an end of stupid quarrels as to 
what kind of play is best and right, and we 
should attain a generous temper to admit that 
all kinds of play are good, if only they be well 
54 



written, well produced, well acted. Good 
plays make good actors and good audiences. 
When an audience rises from a good play, 
it always declares that it is the best play it 
has ever seen. Dramatists should see to it 
that there is rather more than less truth in this 
impression. Audiences never know whether 
they have been delighted with the play or 
with the acting; they do not know where one 
ends and the other begins, and there is no rea- 
son why they should. They go to the theatre 
to procure delight; if they get it in any con- 
siderable quantity, they go again. If not, not. 
It is an old saying that all things are possible 
for the man who does not ask for credit or 
rewards for what he does. This is true, and 
the theatre will not be restored to health 
until dramatists and actors are content to 
take the fun of their work as its chief re- 
ward. 

% The theatre is the creation of the story- 
telling instinct joining hands with the rhyth- 
mic instinct out of which came the dance. 
55 *The 



The ordinary mind approaches art through 
story-telling and seeks to attach a story to 
every picture, every piece of music, that 
pleases it. If the theatre is to live in a demo- 
cratic community it must be prepared to meet 
the ordinary mind in this way. In the theatre 
pictures, music, dancing, as many arts as can 
be usefully employed, are attached to a story 
and woven into it to give to the mind of the 
spectator a glorification of his own visions of 
and emotions concerning life. At its barest, 
the theatre shows the common man his own 
vision familiarly, without elevation or depth. 
— (The corner-shop widow finds melodrama 
"true to life.") — But the story- telling instinct 
seeks something beyond experience, always 
something marvellous; it seeks experience 
kindled by imagination. It is because of this 
constant demand for imagination and the re- 
jection of everything that falls short of it that 
the best plays survive, while ingenious con- 
trivances masquerading as plays are like the 
fashion upon which they come into being — 

56 



they live but for a day and thereafter cannot 
escape ridicule. 

% The essential in the theatre is that dramatic 
unity which can only be achieved by dignity 
and sincerity resulting in the simplicity which 
is the stamp of art. Once this unity has been 
perceived, once the joy of it has been tasted, 
no man can be content with anything that falls 
short of it, or at least of aiming at it. It is 
precisely in the theatre that this joy can be 
made accessible to all men. 
% The conclusion of the matter is this, that 
out of the confusion of the theatre the drama 
is beginning to emerge. In England we have 
the finest drama in the world upon which to 
build. By the activity of the theatre in 
Europe, in almost every country, we are be- 
ing forced to take stock of our heritage and 
to rescue it from the accumulation of false 
tradition beneath which we have allowed it 
to be buried. Much of the work of excava- 
tion has been done, and it will soon be pos- 
sible to create a drama and a theatre worthy 
57 % of 

8S86 66 



of Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Congreve and 
Sheridan, a theatre which shall give back to 
the world in masterpieces old and new the 
joy from which, in its fear and shame, it has 
for too long turned away. Through this joy 
there shall breathe again such a spirit of de- 
light as shall at last justify the great democ- 
racies of the modern world. The theatre 
which in the past has, in Shelley, Browning, 
Dickens, Meredith, rejected so much genius, 
will become the home of genius, the temple 
to which men of genius and talent, whatever 
their craft, may turn in the certain hope of 
finding a welcome and freedom and space in 
which to work in their task of revealing the 
world in all its glory to their fellow-men. 

E pur si muove. 



58 



$ 



